How to Grin Down A Bar

The only bar worth grinnin down is grizz,
but good luck finding one, all dead since 1910,
except for East of Yellowstone. So, first
make airline reservations, but make them fast,
at least four weeks ahead, because they’re crazy,
with rates according to the exact minute that you call!
And people in emergencies, with no time, get killed!
Now, if you do just what I said, you’ll get eaten,
because you have lard for brains listening to a fool
poet tell you what to do in the wild. Bears smell that.
So, better yet, drive a 1200 cc Classic BMW motorbike,
although my friend argues you should tear it down
and build it up before you leave, to drench
yourself equally in both discipline and abandon
so the bar can’t smell you because you’re awful.

Maybe I never actually grinned down a bar,
but I’m fearful of what might happen if I don’t,
afraid the whole thing will go out. My worst fear
is that desire doesn’t come from blood or
nerve lines or somewhere in my goo circuitry.
What if desire is just a guest in the house,
and it decides to go back East, just to see Miami
for a while, or Door County in the Wisconsin thumb,
for the fall, and desire might like it there?
I assume my skin and bones would collapse
like a fireman just leaped out of his suit.
A man writes fraudulent bar grinnin poems
because every poem fails, but what do you do
with a fear so big, it’s weather, bigger fear
than tornado chasers ever saw, bigger than winter,
more like the havoc the dead cold of a meteor might cause
…out there….out there…aimed still at my planet.